2010 « Black Clock

Archive for 2010—

Being Born

www.bornmagazine.org

Born Magazine would make any Marxist proud. Its meshing of media and text — the collaborative volunteer outcomes of artists, writers, musicians, and other creative types — is rendered and wrought at times with tenderness, at times with brashness, and is never boring.

The second issue of Born Magazine is particularly captivating. My personal favorite is the work “Zoology” done by Sasha West and Ernesto Lavendera. The subtle sort of interaction that it requires allows the viewer to have this sort of light participation: comfortable, no decisions, except whether to go on, and I couldn’t imagine not wanting to read the provoking text to the last.

by Sara Gerot
a writer and an Associate Editor of Black Clock

image of Karl Marx happy after reading Born Magazine

mid)rib

Spartan in design and mysterious in origin as only a web-based poetry magazine can be, mid)rib has published five issues of interesting, enigmatic, and occasionally indecipherable poetry with nothing more than two names and a Gmail address on the masthead. The apparently DIY character of the site is balanced, however, by the consistent high quality of the material presented, and by a careful, clean design. One gets the feeling that mid)rib is created not by mad geniuses, but by academics in exile—gone, indeed, a bit mad. If Dr. Moreau had created magazines rather than monsters, this one could well have had a place on the island. Indeed, “The Island of Dr. Toupee” from issue two defines a reoccurring theme for the magazine—that of an experiment, (which may be poetry or modernity, or something else altogether) gone horribly awry.

mid)rib’s editorial aesthetic embraces the austere, the dense, the translated and the untranslatable. The magazine’s name is swiped from botany (the midrib is the central vein of a leaf) and many of the poems reflect a certain scientific bent—as if they are pages from a complete poetic classification of the world. Cross-disciplinary and generative work seems to have become increasingly a focus for the magazine. While mid)rib remains first and foremost a poetry magazine, recent issues have included fiction, artwork, translations, videos, and some decidedly indefinable amalgamations of some or all of the above.

Like any good online poetry zine, mid)rib’s production schedule is a thing quite unknowable, but new issues are well worth watching out for. The current five should provide more than enough material to last us through the wait.

by Emily Kiernan
a native of the decaying Pennsylvania steel town from the Billy Joel song, who writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West, and places that aren’t the way she remembered them

image from mid)rib

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Black Clock provides a much needed fix of experimental fiction and adventurous writing. If you’re getting the itch for some literary stimulation, cut down on the lattes and invest in a subscription.

Books: The Coming Decade

We could talk about how the “Aughts” brought us, largely, fake nonfiction and Roberto Bolaño. We could talk about the explosion in popularity enjoyed by Haruki Murakami and Thomas L. Friedman. We could talk about Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and other luminaries who defined the decade in literature.

But we could also talk about the decade in books⎯defined by publications such as McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, which changed its physical form for each issue, and GOAT, TASCHEN’s giant photographic ode to Muhammad Ali, which is one of the biggest, heaviest, and most expensive books in the history of publishing. These examples are to say: in the first tenth of the 21st Century, publishing has undergone an extensive facelift, if not also a value shift. The beauty and presence of books has become radically elevated, despite the decade’s threat (or, some would argue, promise) of digitalization.

Twenty-seven days into the new decade, Apple announced the release of the iPad⎯the newest, sleekest digital-reading gadget. The Amazon Kindle had been released just over two years before, which was not a failure, but not a viral success, either. Most readers agreed that there was just something missing when you held it, the feeling of holding something aesthetically pleasing in your hands. So the maker of chic computers and cell phones stepped in⎯and we have yet to see how fully the iPad can or will eclipse the book in its use. In the months separating the release of the Kindle from the debut of the iPad, McSweeney’s has gone digital, offering an iPhone application with downloadable content to be read onscreen. The new literary journal Electric Literature makes itself available in multiple digital formats: eBook, Kindle, and iPhone. Some predict that this digitization of literature will render books almost completely obsolete, while others completely deny its potential power. But there is a middle ground here that hasn’t been explored, a whisper of a renaissance that’s not commanding the attention it should.

The middle ground lies in the realm of good design⎯that elusive quality that makes you reach your hand out for something, perhaps without knowing immediately why⎯and there will be a growing cleavage between utilitarian books (textbooks, books used for quick research or classroom assignments) and elective books (everything else). Websites such as Faceout Books and Book Cover Archive evidence the publishing industry’s growing investment in graphic design⎯for paperbacks and even classics, not just for first or collector’s editions. Take, for example, Penguin Books’ Great Ideas series, which attempts to re-popularize such landmark titles as The Art of War and The Social Contract with attractively designed, affordable editions. Take also Melville House’s Art of the Novella series, which is a minimalist approach to lesser known titles by celebrated authors such as Marcel Proust and Leo Tolstoy. NPR San Francisco said of this series, “The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They’re slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed—tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are.”

Such praise, in its nostalgia, indicates that digital readers are in fact inspiring a counterrevolution in the publishing industry that will better the book, and very possibly attract more readers. New, hip editions will very potentially attract more (and more diverse) readers to the minor works of Flaubert or Melville, or to Søren Åbye Kierkegård’s meditations on God. They’ll also draw a wider audience to new writers being published in book form. They’ll demonstrate that in an increasingly dehumanized world, material comes to be invested with more meaning. Books on the shelf have a weight to them⎯literally⎯that something downloaded for a glowing screen doesn’t have. The book transcends the realm of the product in favor of that of the art object. The trend re-enforces Black Clock’s continuing mission to produce a magazine that not only publishes work by exciting writers, but that does so in a physical form that is unique and⎯in a very powerful sense⎯relevant to readers.

So perhaps this decade will be ruled by the iPad. But, perhaps more likely, this decade will be ruled by the book, newly incarnated⎯and if the books of the 2010s reverse the old trope “don’t judge a book by its cover,” then so be it.

by Mallory Farrugia
a writer and freelance editor living in Venice, CA

image of The Crystal Ball by John William Waterhouse

BIRKENSNAKE: THE MUTANT LEFT-BEHIND COUSIN YOU ALWAYS WANTED

Birkensnake is precisely what you want in your lifeboat: good to read, fun to touch. This strange little fiction collection, edited by Brian Conn and Joanna Ruocco, operates somewhere between a literary adventure and art object. Although each issue is offered as a free download on-line, nothing compares to the physical object. Custom designed by artist Sarah McDermott aka Chemlawn, Birkensnake is one of the swankest journals out there.

Last Fall I asked Brian, Joanna, and Sarah to chat with me about Birkensnake. The interview is divided into two parts. Part one features a discussion with editors Brian and Joanna about the journal itself. In part two, Sarah discusses her design process.

THE MASTERMINDS: BRIAN AND JOANNA

BLACK CLOCK: Why did you set out to create Birkensnake? Did you look to other literary magazines for guidance or inspiration?

BRIAN CONN: In fact we started it to get out of coursework. We needed to take a class (we were in the MFA program at Brown) but didn’t want to take a class class, so we thought maybe we’d make up some kind of independent study together, but we couldn’t think of anything we wanted to read, so we thought maybe they will let us do something fun but also totally literary, such as publish a magazine. So we asked them and they let us. We keep doing it because neither of us is willing to be the first to suggest we stop.

We did look at various magazines we happened to have on our shelves. Also consulted with some people at Brown who publish things. Not for inspiration exactly, but just to answer very basic questions about how magazines are supposed to look.

The “look” of Birkensnake is almost as integral to the magazine as the writing. What motivated you to hand-make each issue?

BC: The basic decision was that it is all right to spend a lot of time but not all right to spend a lot of money. Of course we do end up spending a lot of money on acrylic ink, so that isn’t really a reason. But with screen printing you have the thrill of working in a friend’s basement studio day after day after day and late into the night listening to the same three tapes over and over again and wondering whether you will get a repetitive motion injury. Actually nobody knows why we screen print the covers. With laser printing you just put down some money and then all the covers come out of a machine and you, like, glue them or something.

Birkensnake is offered online for free or for $4.00. In a world driven by financial profit, Birkensnake is clearly not interested in “making money.” How important is accessibility and the idea of community to you as an editor and writer?

BC: The most important thing is finding the people who will love the magazine. Maybe that is the same as accessibility or community. Each copy seems like a personal object to us, because we made it by hand, and so we want it to find a good home. It hurts us to send out review copies (we do it anyway) knowing that they’ll end up on some weird shelf in some weird basement, mold for two years, and then get thrown away unread when the reviewer moves to Australia. It hurt just to type that. I sewed that thing! We assume that there are not many people out there who will love it the way it needs to be loved and so we need to make it easy for those people.

Also we both have self esteem problems and do not believe that anything we make could be worth more than four dollars.

Has running a literary magazine impacted your writing? Has your experience as a writer influenced how you operate and edit Birkensnake?

JOANNA RUOCCO: Reading submissions requires more attention than reading the normal stuff we read, like Anabasis and M.F.K. Fisher recipes, because we want to open ourselves up to each piece, to give each piece the chance to dazzle us and change us. In that way, editing Birkensnake requires an energetic commitment, like joining a dating service, and that impacts our writing, because going on lots of dates means you can’t write as much. But then the dates yield the demented baby Birkensnake, which makes us excited about writing again, and so even though we have little time that is not usurped by Birkensnake, we begin to write again, using a kind of shorthand to capture Birkensnake‘s various squawks and cries, and then making a few narrative bridges between them. This is different than the way we wrote before. We operate and edit Birkensnake with a great deal of enthusiasm, because, as writers, we like supporting other writers, and because, as writers, we feel strangely elated when we read a story that blocks the usual channels for interpreting sense-data, and we want to share the story so other people can feel skewed and excited too.

Birkensnake’s submission guidelines say, “We’d like to see narrative taken apart and then reassembled into something almost, but not quite, what it was before. If the story gets sort of broken in the process, that’s okay with us.” Additionally, the magazine seems to publish a fair amount of speculative and slipstream fiction. To what extent, if at all, does the text inform the design?

JR: We’re interested in non-realist fiction, fiction where weird things happen and fiction where the language and structure unsettle expectations about what constitutes a world, or a person, or a story. As a genre, speculative fiction brings people into confrontation, or coexistence, with new worlds and new species, in order to change the way we think about the limits of our own world, species, or subjectivity. Because of speculative fiction’s concerns, many writers who are drawn to that genre are also drawn to writing styles that trouble the rules, or boundaries, of the genre, and we tend to like stylistically troublesome narrative probes. So we publish some writing that could be considered speculative, slipstream, or even straight-up science fiction. We don’t believe in policing the borders between literary and genre fiction, and we’re particularly drawn to texts that skip around in undecidable and potentially dangerous zones between categories.

Where would you like the magazine to head in the future?

JR: Birkensnake is not for everyone, but we want it to remain accessible to everyone (cheap). It’s the mutant, left-behind cousin of the glossy magazine and the mass-market paperback, and we want it to keep mutating. We want Birkensnake to incorporate different kinds of writers and writings and we want to let its form shift depending on both to the content of each issue and the particular resources we have on hand when we enter into production. We scavenge materials to make the physical object, and as editors, we have the mentality of gleaners, always looking for the stories that drop beneath the sights of contemporary literary and genre publishers, or that look slightly too misshapen or rotten to be picked. We hope people find out about Birkensnake and read it, and that people send us their stories, so that in the future Birkensnake can be as weirdly glorious as it is already, with a slightly wider dissemination. We are not ambitious. We want messy, awesome fiction bound together with Frankenstein stitches to be an option if you’re in that kind of mood.

THE VISIONARY: CHEMLAWN

How did you become acquainted with Birkensnake?

CHEMLAWN: Joanna is a friend of mine from college and she asked me to do the cover. We lived together for several years and found increasingly that our creative visions were complimentary. Birkensnake was our first real collaboration with a legit distributed product. I didn’t know Brian but I quickly knew we’d work well together too.

Issue 1 not only features the cover design but also, on the inside flaps, an “Index for Radiological Diagnoses.” Issue 2 is both beautiful to look at and fun to touch. Where did you get the idea for each design? Can you tell us a little about the basic construction for each issue? How many different designs, if any, were created before the final design was completed?

CL: Both Birkensnakes were easy to design because the writing in them is so visually rich. The designs are somewhat literal collages of images present in the text. Birkensnake One has the beefhead from Sam Roberts story and Birkensnake Two is a mash of different things- Blake Butler’s hive, Caren Gusoff’s semiconductors and capacitors, Matthew Pendleton’s cone, etc. Both issues were made under a lot of time pressure, especially the second issue, in which I traveled to Providence from Alabama, with 5 days for both the designing and printing. So we didn’t really have a lot of time for fiddling around- on both issues we used the first design I came up with. The construction is collaborative. I came up with the general structures (I study Book Arts- the first is a simple double pamphlet with wraparound covers, and the second is a long stitch style) but both Joanna and Brian have a good intuition for how materials work and a willingness to get into new things and figure them out, so we all worked on it together.

Providence has this awesome place where you can get left over industrial materials for 10 cents a pound, so we went there and found the radiology folders. They were too good to pass up so we decided to use them not knowing how they would react to the ink or fold or tear or wear over time. For the second issue Brian got very excited about branding or burning elements of the design, and then he found the flocked paper (at the above place). He and Joanna did a couple of test burns and mailed them to me so I could think about it, but we still really had no idea how the burning would interact with the ink until we took the printed covers to the park and blow torched them.

Birkensnake’s submission guidelines say: “We’d like to see narrative taken apart and then reassembled into something almost, but not quite, what it was before. If the story gets sort of broken in the process, that’s okay with us.” Additionally, the magazine seems to publish a fair amount of speculative and slipstream fiction. To what extent, if at all, does the text inform the design?

CL: As mentioned above, the text totally informs the design, at least the cover art. I think the stories really hold together as a unit. I interpret the above submission guideline to mean, in effect if not purpose, and from my non-writer’s standpoint, “almost normal, but kind of f***ed,” so I think the covers follow that- they are pretty obviously representational but hopefully have their own odd logic to them. For the structure, we knew we wanted to keep it simple. We didn’t have a ton of time to devote to binding, and we wanted to be able to sell them for very cheap. We wanted to make a visually and tactilely interesting object that is also accessible.

Brian Conn finished his MFA in the Literary Arts program at Brown University in 2008. His first novel, The Fixed Stars, came out from FC2 in Spring 2010. He teaches writing at the University of Rhode Island and co-edits Birkensnake with Joanna Ruocco.

Joanna Ruocco lives in Providence, RI, where she coedits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She has published stories in Marginalia, Quick Fiction, Tarpaulin Sky, No Colony, Webconjunctions, Caketrain, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, Man’s Companions, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press. The Mothering Coven is her first novel.

Sarah aka Chemlawn McDermott lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where she makes books and prints as The Kidney Press. She is finishing her MFA thesis- a book arts edition of Joanna Ruocco’s Compendium of Domestic Incidents, which is being simultaneously published as a chapbook by Noemi Press. She is interested in collaboration, especially between experimental writing and the book arts.

by Elizabeth Hall
who was born in Louisana and raised in Georgia by two back-to-the-landers who got bored;
her website is fireflyoffice.org/coquetry

Twitterature: When Moby Dick Became The Fail Whale

The microblogging service Twitter has, from it launch in 2006, been a case study in the ability of certain “products” in our new global digital economy have to fascinate with a potent and broad (or wide) allure (and one that cannot be reduced to mere novelty.) In the aftermath of two very different but equally historic elections — one in the United States, the other in Iran — Twitter has been studied and celebrated as a force for social transformation. But the literati, historians in their own right, have been paying attention to what Twitter might mean to their own concerns and pursuits, and in increasing numbers. But Twitter does not resemble conventional publishing in any way other than: 1) it is text-based; 2) it allows for the dissemination of said text to a (presumably) mass audience (latest estimates: 75 million users); 3) all tweets (even those generated by spambots and virtual porn-stars) now have a permanent residence in cultural institutions, thanks to the Library of Congress’s recently announced “Twitter archive.” From another perspective, however, Twitter is a reminder of how strangely mediated and encrusted with ritual and industrial vestige conventional publishing is. Further, Twitter has very little in common with traditional mass media, the scope and frequency of its use aside… but would one really compare the ball-point pen to television? Twitter is a communications technology that is being used by certain media companies and players, but it has much more in common with the postcard, telegraphy, and telephony than it does the newspaper, the novel, the glossy magazine or the independent film. So, perhaps it is that Twitter shapes an experience of language that for certain writers and readers captures better than any book where literature comes from, as well as to which events, subjects and themes literature should lend its voice.

To gain a better sense of how something so simple as a new way of sending short messages might be transforming literature, on March 6, 2010, Black Clock invited 4 individuals well-known for their creative use of Twitter’s mere 140 characters to participate in an e-roundtable on this phenomenon.

The participants:

Phil Gyford (@philgyford): UK-based web-designer; prime mover behind the re-publication of Samuel Pepys’ Diary of 1667 via Twitter, @samuelpepys

Andy Hunter (@ElectricLit): editor of Electric Literature and sponsor / publisher / prime mover behind the Twitter publication of Rick Moody’s short story “Some Contemporary Characters”

Collin Kelley (@CollinKelley): novelist, poet, blogger and co-editor (with Didi Menendez) of the “Twitter Poets” issue of Ocho (#24)

Joe Milazzo (@slowstudies ): author, Associate Editor of Black Clock; editor of the online journal [out of nothing]

Kevin Thom (@kevinthom): Ontario-based photographer and publisher of Twitter-fiction @microprose

1:05 PM

Joe Milazzo: The four of you are all engaged in rather different literary projects involving Twitter. But in the interests of identifying some common ground, could each of you speak to what drew you to want to experiment with Twitter in the first place?

1:07 PM

Phil Gyford: I’d been running http://www.pepysdiary.com/ (the daily entries of a diary from 17th century London) for a few years and was going to start a Twitter feed linking to each day’s entry.

Collin Kelley: I’m a poet, and I wanted to meet other poets on Twitter. I soon realized poets were all trying to find each other, so I started creating a directory of poets using Twitter. I posted that directory on my blog and thousands of people came to my blog to see it.

Phil Gyford: Then I realized it made more sense to post quotes from each diary entry during the relevant day, as if he was Twittering the day’s events in real time.

1:08 PM

Kevin Thom: I was looking to enjoy Twitter in way that was more personal to me than just the average “I’m having breakfast” kind of updates I was seeing. I was inspired by some of the brief and beautiful Tweets I’d seen from friends, and soon found an entire community of microfiction writers. Andy Hunter: We are always looking for ways that literary content can have more reach. Twitter seemed a natural. Rick Moody was interested in how limitations can influence the form of a work. As an author of long sentences, he was interested in the brevity and haiku-like nature of the Tweet.

1:09 PM

Joe Milazzo: Quite a range of interests here… from community building to audience building (which can often be one and the same thing) to pure experimentation to using Twitter as a kind of performance platform.

1:10 PM

Kevin Thom: It was also a way for me to try to translate my photographic style into other media. (Since photography is my day job.)

Collin Kelley: It was a community builder for me. I wanted to help other poets build their following and reach a larger audience. Out of creating the directory, I was asked to co-edit the issue of Ocho (a literary magazine) featuring some of the Twitter poets.

Joe Milazzo: Kevin — so, is it fair to say that Twitter has helped you expand your artistic practice?

1:11 PM

Andy Hunter: I imagine there’s common ground in the form: the limitations of Twitter require an attention to detail, and exactness of language, that suits poets and careful writers of prose, the sentence-obsessed.

Kevin Thom: Yes, definitely. I think all creative outlets can expand each other.

Joe Milazzo: Yes, Twitter seems to me to be, in part, a kind of Oulipian dream-machine

Kevin Thom: I also do long form improvisational comedy in Toronto, and that helps both my writing and my photography.

Phil Gyford: I find it quite satisfying to trim Pepys’ quite verbose sentences down to 140 characters without changing the essential nature of them.

1:12 PM

Joe Milazzo: Or: when inspiration fails, there are always rules, constraints, and conceptual “games” to “play”

Kevin Thom: Phil, it’s fun to edit things to get to their essence. That appeals to me too.

Andy Hunter: I’m not sure what an Oulipian dream-machine is, but I want one.

Kevin Thom: I think Sony makes it.

Collin Kelley: I’m always looking for useful links to news and info. That’s what one of the reasons I use Twitter.

Joe Milazzo: Maybe if Brion Gysin had been hanging out with Raymond Queneau rather than Burroughs…

1:13 PM

Collin Kelley: And most writers I know — poets, fiction, non-fiction — are using Twitter to promote their work and build a network and fan-base.

1:14 PM

Andy Hunter: We mostly use Twitter to distribute links, in our day-to-day use of it. Perhaps because there’s no one auteur, we’re a publisher, not an artist, although of course we are all writers. But I envy you who use it as a creative outlet. For us, it’s a conduit.

Joe Milazzo: The promotional and community-building aspects interest me as well, in the sense that writers in this day and age seem more and more comfortable doing a lot of, for lack of a better term, “public relations” work for themselves. More so than in the past, during which the writer’s reclusiveness and public silence could be inversely proportionate to his / her fame. And there are a lot of eyes on Twitter.

1:15 PM

Kevin Thom: I think that to succeed, all artists need to learn to be comfortable promoting themselves, and get over the concept that it’s somebody else’s job.

1:16 PM

Collin Kelley: Many writers are turned off by “self-promotion,” but we’re at a time now where the only promotion is self-promotion, especially if you self-publish or work with an indie / micro press

Andy Hunter: There are a lot of eyes, but it’s also ephemeral. If someone isn’t logged on, they can easily miss something.

Joe Milazzo: Or perhaps Twitter and other forms of interactive media are profoundly changing what the writing profession is, what it involves… or reminding us that writing has a history as a profession (and not just a craft.)

Kevin Thom: Twitter and Facebook and all other social media make it easier.

1:17 PM

Andy Hunter: Writers who are best at it, like Colson Whitehead (@colsonwhitehead), are not just self-promoting but are creating unique, vital content for the medium.

Joe Milazzo: Maybe Twitter is the 18th Century coffeehouse of the present day… do you all see / notice quite a bit of artistic exchange via Twitter, etc.? Or: how does being on Twitter, as opposed to just Twitter, the interface itself, effect your work?

1:18 PM

Kevin Thom: Twitter, with all its rigidity, imposes a useful framework and structure that ends up creating a form of art all its own.

Phil Gyford: I’m not sure that I have any “artistic exchange”, on Twitter or otherwise

Collin Kelley: I interviewed Margaret Atwood a few weeks ago and she likened Twitter to the telegraph. It’s a way to send out vital info and notes. At least it is for her.

Kevin Thom: I liken it to the frame of a photograph, which also imposes a limitation of the entire world in front of the lens.

Andy Hunter: I fear that writers are great procrastinators, so to some extent I am afraid it takes away from their work. Also, all these micro-rewards alter our brain structure and make it harder to think meditatively.

1:20 PM

Collin Kelley: I talked about this on Melissa Broder’s blog last week. http://www.melissabroder.com/2010/richard-hugo-didnt-Twitter/

Joe Milazzo: Well, traditionally, writing has been seen as this solitary activity… but there is also a long tradition of writing that emerges from social — by which I do not mean overly political; rather, something more akin to “literary hanging out” — engagement

Collin Kelley: I think it has much to do with time management

Joe Milazzo: Collin — the responses Melissa received were pretty wide-ranging as well.

1:21 PM

Collin Kelley: Any kind of social networking can be a time-sucker, but you have to be able to turn it off in your brain and get back to the real work.

Andy Hunter: It’s wonderful that it can be an art form. And as such, it has more in common with poetry. As communication, it can be wonderful. But the time spent ruminating on any one Tweet is significantly less than a great line in a printed poem, I think.

Kevin Thom: I don’t consider my own Twitter fiction to be social at all. I write and I put it out there, without any expectation that anyone else will read it. I do interact with other microfiction authors, but it seems separate from the act of writing.

Joe Milazzo: It seems like most writers feel they have to “deal,” cope or otherwise investigate this thing, Twitter, that is happening outside of yet parallel to their interests, but embracing it… that is a whole other matter —

1:22 PM

Joe Milazzo: Kevin, your response prompts me to ask all: how do you expect readers to interact with your various Twitter initiatives? Assuming you have any expectations

Collin Kelley: I think more writers are coming around to social networking. It reminds me of all the literary magazines who said they would never have an online edition or accept work via email. Now they all do.

1:23 PM

Kevin Thom: I don’t really have any expectations about that. I do it because I want to and I can. I get a lot of satisfaction from paring down a feeling or a relationship or a thought to the 140 character limit. If others want to read it, or if they comment, it’s flattering, but not necessary for me.

1:25 PM

Andy Hunter: Kevin, do you worry that these Tweets are lost in time, like tears in the rain (Blade Runner)? When we re-printed the Moody story in our journal, many people responded positively to both their ability to more meaningfully engage with content, and the sense of permanence it has..

Collin Kelley: I don’t have any expectations either. I just try to make the Tweet useful in some way. I like to share links and promote other writers. I can’t stand the whole “I just ate breakfast,” “i just got up,” “i just took a crap.”

Joe Milazzo: Kevin, it seems as if, in some sense, Twitter itself helps to give form to what otherwise might lack shapeliness. That seems consistent with principles very familiar to anyone who works in non-linguistic media, but writers, other than poets, seem less inclined (or perhaps have not been trained so much) to give the power of form to create meaning much consideration.

1:26 PM

Kevin Thom: Andy, they may be lost in time, or in the flood of new content, but I know where to find them again if I want to. Also, they do seem to be a bit ephemeral. The good news is I can make more 😛

Joe Milazzo: Collin — so, Twitter as conventionally used is of little interest to you? How do others feel?

1:27 PM

Collin Kelley: Now that Google is streaming Twitter and making it searchable, I don’t think it’s lost.

Kevin Thom: Joe, definitely to me I enjoy using Twitter to bring form to the formless.

Collin Kelley: I’d like to think that the way I use Twitter is the conventional way.

Phil Gyford: The mundane Tweets are interesting to me if they’re written by people I’m interested in – my friends. Kevin Thom: Sometimes I get a thought while I’m driving or while I’m cooking, and can’t wait to push it into e-reality in a microfiction Tweet.

1:28 PM

Collin Kelley: I don’t even want the mundane from my friends.

Andy Hunter: Who here would want a book published of their best Tweets, and why or why not?

Joe Milazzo: Phil, if Pepys were alive today, do you think he’d be using Twitter? Or would he need, as Andy suggests, a more reflective form (still)?

Kevin Thom: I also have a separate Twitter account I use “traditionally” to promote or socialize.
Joe Milazzo: And, apropos Andy’s question: http://www.Tweetbookz.com/

1:29 PM

Kevin Thom: Andy, I like the concept of a book, but I feel like I need to focus my main creative output on photography, while still enjoying dabbling in things like microfiction.

Phil Gyford: I have no idea. Pepys is only as likely to use it as any top civil servant is. And if he did, it would be very different to the Tweets I’m sending from his secret, personal diary.

Joe Milazzo: Andy, it would have to be a very special kind of book that somehow made a commentary on the Twitter experience itself, and by formal means

Collin Kelley: A book of Tweets — unless it’s flash fiction or haiku — might be boring.

1:30 PM

Collin Kelley: Without the links and interaction, it would just be flat on the page. Literally.

Joe Milazzo: Phil, that is what so interests me about your project, how it seems engaged with all these issues regarding how we now construe what is public and what is private… and those “mundane” Tweets we are all sort of grimacing at here are examples of otherwise private thoughts, sensations, expressions, etc. made public.

Kevin Thom: Collin, there could be a snail-mail address in the book for writing to the author.

1:31 PM

Collin Kelley: LOL, not quite the same

Kevin Thom: Or a carrier pigeon.

Andy Hunter: Certain lines, from certain authors or poems, achieve a life of their own due to some insight, cleverness, or linguistic perfection. Could that happen via Twitter? If a beautiful Tweet happens past, is it remembered a day later?

1:32 PM

Kevin Thom: Certainly!

Collin Kelley: When I co-edited the issue of Ocho, it was about promoting the idea of Twitter. Some of the poems we used were assembled lines. One poet even created a sonnet out of Tweets.

Joe Milazzo: Myself, I think it is important to keep certain writing “native” to Twitter. Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters” was, for me, about the experience of reading Twitter and trying to keep the thread of the story alive even as one managed other Tweets in one’s queue, etc.

1:33 PM

Joe Milazzo: Twitter, to me, gets increasingly interesting as it ages… I mean, in the context of what Twitter is and how it is all about the present, a Tweet from as recent as October 2009 feels incredibly old to me… it is the archaeological repository (the midden?) of the recent past.

1:34 PM

Collin Kelley: A couple of writers I know have tried to Tweet sections of their book. …entire chapters. It’s a bit hard to follow, but an interesting an idea.

Phil Gyford: I haven’t read much fiction on Twitter to be honest, but when I have it felt like it got in the way of my main use — keeping in touch with friends. So, because the fragments of Twitter fiction are so intermingled with other texts, the contexts different readers bring vary much more than with other forms.

1:35 PM

Collin Kelley: Twitter is entering a new phase. When they start putting up the advertising, I’ll be interested to see how many people it drives away.

Joe Milazzo: Well, Twitter this week just reached its ten billionth Tweet “milestone”… though said Tweet was private / protected and no one really knows what was said… a sign of things to come?

Phil Gyford: If I followed a more varied selection of people – more famous people, more bots, more people writing fiction – Twitter fiction would probably fit in better with my use of it.

Andy Hunter: I think writing has to fit the form. I’m against using Twitter to publish work that was written for a different format. But I’m completely for work that is written for the medium, and especially if it somehow incorporates the social nature of the service as well as its limitations.

1:36 PM

Joe Milazzo: Ten Billionth Tweet source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/Twitter/7375442/Twitter-hits-10-billionth-Tweet.html

Kevin Thom: I think Twitter fiction should be designed and written to match the limitations and advantages of Twitter.

Joe Milazzo: So, when you move expression into and out of Twitter, what transformations — if any — does it undergo? Is something always lost?

Andy Hunter: But Phil, what you are publishing is not “keeping in touch with friends.”

Kevin Thom: To serialize a book through Twitter seems a bit cumbersome.

1:37 PM

Collin Kelley: Kevin, I agree.

Phil Gyford: Andy, yes, I know, and it’s possible I wouldn’t read Pepys if I wasn’t publishing it myself

Joe Milazzo: What if — and I believe some writers are doing this — as an author, you Tweeted as one of the characters you had invented?

Joe Milazzo: And, Phil… so is it fair to say your project is as much about your reading experience of Pepys as it is about “sharing” him?

1:38 PM

Phil Gyford: Joe — I’m not sure I understand

Kevin Thom: Joe, I don’t like to put a judgment of “gained” or “lost” on it, because it is just what it is. When it’s done right, it could not be done any other way and still be the same thing.

Collin Kelley: I like what Phil has done with Pepys. It brings new readers to SP’s work and hopefully a reader will want to explore more deeply.

1:39 PM

Andy Hunter: I think Tweeting in-character is a great idea and we’ve been trying to find someone to do it. And I think John Wray (@john_wray) does it, after a fashion, consistently.

Joe Milazzo: Phil — I guess it is a question of how you chose what and when to pull from Pepys’ work for publishing on Twitter. To me, that is as much a record of your reading him as it is anything else.

Kevin Thom: Collin — that’s interesting to me from an improvisational comedy point of view. I used to write the occasional blog entry as a stream of consciousness from a character I’d invented on the spot. It was my way of doing improv online.

1:40 PM

Phil Gyford: Joe — I guess so. But I’m also trying to give a balanced view of Pepys’ life that day. So, a mixture of mundane and more outlandish events.

Joe Milazzo: Andy, I was thinking of John Wray. But I wonder if such a project makes more sense for novelists, who are used to characters taking on lives of their own (after a fashion) than writers in other genres. Phil — so, your project is a kind of digest?

Collin Kelley: There are a couple of people who Tweet in character and do it well: There’s a guy who Tweets as the Gene Hunt character from [the television series] Ashes To Ashes (@genehunt) who is brilliant. And another who Tweets at Carlotta Valdes, the painting from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (@carlotta_valdes).

1:41 PM

Phil Gyford: Joe — Yes, I suppose it is. A “lite” version of the diary entries, but also more real time, so it feels more like he’s living his life alongside your own.

Joe Milazzo: Collin — how do you see poets best taking advantage of the artistic potential of Twitter?

Phil Gyford: Last year I worked on a website for a UK TV drama about teenagers in which the main characters all had active Twitter accounts, e.g.: http://Twitter.com/SimonMisfits.

1:42 PM

Kevin Thom: Phil — that’s cool.

Joe Milazzo: Phil — does Pepys feel more contemporary to you as a consequence of your work on this project?

Phil Gyford: Whoever wrote the Twitters did a good job of keeping in character and expanding them beyond the weekly TV show: http://Twitter.com/nathanmisfits.

Kevin Thom: Phil — it’s a great way to keep the show relevant while it’s between episodes.

1:43 PM

Collin Kelley: Most of the poets I know are looking for opportunities. They want links to submit work, share their upcoming readings. Others are Tweeting haiku and lines of their work. I think it has many potential uses for poets.

Andy Hunter: I hope Twitter might improve writing. I’m a big fan of the ol’ Strunk & White “Omit unnecessary words.” In our slush pile, it seems many still believe adding words (fancy ones, typically) makes you an official writer. Twitter could help people get in the habit of pruning.

Phil Gyford: Joe, I’m not sure about “contemporary”, although some people assume it’s all made-up as they draw very direct parallels between his Tweets and modern-day events!

1:44 PM

Joe Milazzo: Phil, that’s interesting, especially for s a project that also feels to me to be related to augmented reality games and other forms of (unbounded or strictly “unstaged”) performance. And I suppose what you describe is inevitable given the platform itself.

1:45 PM

Phil Gyford: Andy, Interesting that you think Twitter’s brevity could improve writing, and I know what you mean, but in contrast many people have been concerned about teenagers writing in “TXT-speak” because they use it all the time in SMS messages — I’m not sure Twitter will help that!

1:46 PM

Kevin Thom: People complaining about TXT-speak seems as ridiculous to me as people complaining that handwriting doesn’t look like typing. Each way of communicating eventually evolves to fit its medium.

1:47 PM

Collin Kelley: I think you can make a perfectly coherent sentence in a Tweet without resorting to TXT-speak. It’s like poetry — using the least amount of words for maximum effect.

Kevin Thom: That being said, I won’t use TXT-speak, even when sending SMS.

Joe Milazzo: But our language is always changing and adjusting to the realities we create for ourselves… surely the rise of the newspaper, for example, altered the way language was used, and in ways that felt like a diminution or degrading of discourse to those alive at the time.

Andy Hunter: OMG, TXT-speak is like, WTF is happening to the English Language? Last time I spoke with Gary Shteyngart he was writing his next novel in txt speak (not sure if he stuck with it.) He said, “text communication destroying the written word is the ultimate irony.”

Phil Gyford: Of course you can, and you can punctuate and spell properly in texts. But many people, teenagers and older, don’t bother and it’s normal not to. So I’m not sure there’s a case for it helping what we think of as conventional literacy.

1:48 PM

Andy Hunter: I think most serious writers using Twitter won’t use TXT-speak, and I guess that’s who I was thinking of when I spoke of limitations helping people analyze and refine their writing.

Joe Milazzo: TXT-speak communication is “the written word” for many these days.

1:49 PM

Collin Kelley: Tao Lin (@tao_lin) has made a career out of it. He uses it abundantly in his novel

1:51 PM

Andy Hunter: The problem with TXT-speak is it aint pretty. I have no problem with the evolution of language, but loving writing includes fetishization of words. It’s hard to feel that way about acronyms.

1:52 PM

Kevin Thom: I think it’s just a fetishization that is incompatible with the fetishization of regular words.

Joe Milazzo: Well, you could also use Twitter to compose an incredibly long sentence, 140 characters at a time…

Kevin Thom: Like the incompatibility between soft candlelight romance and hard leather and chains.

1:54 PM

Joe Milazzo: Re: the long sentence proposal: my point being, Twitter only “imposes” so much… it is like any constraint; part of the pleasure lies in finding innovative ways to solve or work around it… which leads to my next question… Andy, Collin and Kevin, too, going back to your initial comments about hat you like about Twitter: ee like to say, or pretend, that with respect to a phenomenon as new or unprecedented as Twitter, that “there are no rules” for how it may be used and what significance it may ultimately have. But Twitter has been around for 4 years now, an eternity in online time, and it has a history. Do you feel there any rules in place, really, especially when it comes to Twitter literature?

1:55 PM

Andy Hunter: Rules for Twitter fiction: 1. Write for the medium, don’t just break up a story into 140 character increments.

1:56 PM

Collin Kelley: I don’t think there are any rules, at least none that have become set rules. If there are, someone please share them.

Andy Hunter: 2. Don’t tell anyone it’s fiction.

Kevin Thom: I don’t think there are any rules, like anyone is going to come out of your computer and ban you from Twitter for breaking them, but I think that there are things that could make writing effective for the medium. Andy’s “Rule 1” is one of those things.

1:57 PM

Andy Hunter: 3. End each story with “ROFL”

Collin Kelley: I agree Kevin.

Joe Milazzo: What about LMAO?

Kevin Thom: Those both use valuable letters!

Andy Hunter: 4. Ending a story with ROFLMAO is acceptable but self-aggrandizing.

1:58 PM

Kevin Thom: You may use OMGWTFBBQ! only once in your career.

Andy Hunter: I’m sorry you just used up yours. Or does it occurring in Gchat exempt you?

Joe Milazzo: Seems like overt self-aggrandizement could be interpreted as a commentary on Twitter itself… but who wants to get all meta- at this point?

Kevin Thom: Dammit. There are no exemptions.

1:59 PM

Andy Hunter: I’m going to save mine for a special occasion. I can’t wait.

Joe Milazzo: BBQ is always a special occasion.

Kevin Thom: It’s hard to aggrandize yourself too much in 140 characters, but you could always link to a blog post.

Collin Kelley: Slightly off topic, but does anyone have an opinion about Google’s new Buzz feature?

Kevin Thom: Collin–I don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but it’s cool that it’s there.

2:00 PM

Joe Milazzo: Collin–I’ve not tried it… though the little rainbow speech balloon doo-hickey keeps staring balefully at me as I try desperately to stay current on my correspondence

Kevin Thom: Google needs to find ways to spend all these dollars they’re making! Might as well be developing social media of limited usefulness.

Joe Milazzo: Staring, that is, as if to say: “Don’t you know email is obsolete?”

Phil Gyford: I felt I have enough ways to keep in touch with people for the moment, and didn’t want to spend time figuring another one out and then having to use it.

Andy Hunter: I’m frightened of anything new, at this point. I don’t have any time left for anything new. Leave me alone, Google Buzz! The worst is that if you don’t participate, people think you’re blowing them off.

2:01 PM

Collin Kelley: I’m on it, but not actively using it. I linked my blog to it, so when I post there it updates Buzz.

Joe Milazzo: Collin — you find it useful?

Collin Kelley: Not really. Since half of my email contacts are on Yahoo. LOL.

Kevin Thom: Ha!

Collin Kelley: And some are still on AOL.

Kevin Thom: Wow. I didn’t know there still was an AOL.

2:02 PM

Joe Milazzo: Sarah Silverman (@sarahksilverman) had a pretty funny riff on AOL after the CEO [?] gave her recent TED Talk a less than stellar review.

Collin Kelley: Shockingly, there is.

Kevin Thom: I haven’t received a CD in the mail lately.

Joe Milazzo: Phil’s response prompts me to recall that, well, yes, there are hidden costs in all this. Time is incredibly scarce in the Twitter era, as is attention. It is easier, in some ways, to waste money that either time or attention.

2:03 PM

Kevin Thom: Multitasking is key. Currently, I’m writing microfiction, doing a swimsuit model photo shoot, playing Nintendo DS, cooking a turkey, and participating in this chat. Hook your finger in the bikini waistband and pop the hip out. Oops wrong window.

2:04 PM

Joe Milazzo: Kevin — which to me proposes that human beings are becoming something they’ve never quite been before in their long and very infrequently illustrious history. But at least Twitter adds to that historical record

Collin Kelley: As soon as we’re done with this chat, I’m signing off to work on my book. I’m done with Twitter for today.

Andy Hunter: OMFG MY AOL CD IS FUBAR, WTF? IS THE CEO ON TED? DS? You guys and your acronyms. You’re ruining beautiful language.

Kevin Thom: Yep. We’re different creatures than we were even a few years ago.

Joe Milazzo: Collin — you find it helps to set such rules for yourself?

Andy Hunter: I LOLed at Kevin’s joke.

Collin Kelley: It’s a must.

2:06 PM

Collin Kelley: I could sit on Twitter or Facebook all day. I’m still an Internet junkie, so I have to turn off the Wi-Fi and get my head back into creating.

Joe Milazzo: OK, allow me one last question, please… What next for you all, in terms of your literary work with / within Twitter and / or social media in general?

Andy Hunter: Joe, I think my question is how that will change our brain structures – the brain being plastic, it surely will – and how that will in turn affect our ability to engage with literature.

Kevin Thom: Good point Collin. It’s easy to get sidetracked when there’s an infinite universe of distraction only seconds away.

2:07 PM

Collin Kelley: For National Poetry Month in April, I’m going to publish a new list of Poets on Twitter.

Kevin Thom: Joe, for me, it’s life as usual. I’m going to flow with what makes me feel good and engages my creativity in a way that supports me and my career as a photographer. If it’s Twitter, that’s great. If it’s the next great thing, then I’m on to that.

Phil Gyford: I have a couple more years of Pepys’s Twitters to go.

Collin Kelley: I get emails and DMs on Twitter wanting to know when I’m going to create a new list.

2:08 PM

Joe Milazzo: Andy, I agree, and I think there’s a great, non-science fiction novel yet to be written about how the internet as it came to be and is has changed human subjectivity.

Joe Milazzo: Phil — did you set out on this project with an end date in mind?

2:09 PM

Phil Gyford: I also think there’s some more Twitter scope in a shared fictional workplace I’m involved in http://Twitter.com/pretendoffice (see also its list of “Colleagues”, each by a different real person). And, Joe, there are nearly 9.5 years of Pepys’ daily diary, so that’s the time limit. Nearly there!

Joe Milazzo: Wow.

Phil Gyford: Sadly, Twitter wasn’t around for most of that time.

Joe Milazzo: I’ll be interested to hear your take on it all once its completed.

by Joe Milazzo
an Associate Editor of Black Clock and Director of Community Education and Outreach at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas, whose writing has appeared in Electronic Book Review, Chronometry, Tea Party, In Posse Review, Antennae and Black Clock

Claire Phillips is a Cyborg (Maybe)

Claire Phillips and I sip our morning cappuccinos at the ever-busy, ever-trendy Intelligentsia Café. I squint swollen-eyed over cappuccino steam and tell Claire how early 11 am feels to me. She laughs with the confidence of a woman who’s been wide-awake for hours. Her red lipstick is perfectly placed and her sleek, waved black hair does not frizz beneath the light February breeze. I suspect that she is the type who can stay up late, wake up early, and still look lively; possibly she is not human. Maybe she is a cyborg.

I’ve wanted to interview Claire since I first took her Science Fiction writing class at CalArts. Her syllabus offered a wide array of sci-fi names I’d seen, as well as many names I hadn’t. Claire opened the door to galaxies of fantastic worlds that any budding fantastical writer should have the opportunity to experience.

Now that I’ve sampled her brilliant reading list, I have the mastermind here in my presence, flocked by glancing hipsters who vacantly browse the web on their laptops. I wonder if they feel the telepathic vibrations of a genius among their ranks.

BLACK CLOCK: Are there any projects you’re currently working on? Are they science fiction related?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I’m finishing a novel called The Story of Dora that will appear in conjunction with the photographs of the Dutch artist Monica Nouwens. I’d call it a satire with science fiction tinges. I don’t think of myself as a straight science fiction writer because it’s not a mainstream work. It’s about a cyborg who predicts the stock market with her orgasms, and I based this on [international investment firm] D. E. Shaw’s stock market prediction machine from the ‘90’s.

I wrote the text on my own and Nouwens’ photographs interact with the text. It’s very much an artists’ book. We decided to collaborate because both my writing and her photography centered on Los Angeles. The Netherlands Architecture Institute picked it up and [the] publishing grants are still in the works.

Are you working on any science fiction related shorts?

I’m working on a couple of short pieces. I became very interested in some of the themes from the course I’m teaching at CalArts. One piece I’m writing is vampire-themed, another is sci-fi based, an homage to and mad rendering of James Tiptree*, you could say.

*James Tiptree, Jr. being one of the pseudonyms employed by author Alice Bradley Sheldon, who published speculative fiction via this male persona for nearly two decades. (eds.)

What initially sparked your interest in works of science fiction and “slipstream” fiction? Who inspires you?

My dad is a scientist, so I would read everything he had in his closet, namely Vonnegut and Asimov, all books he collected at airports in the ‘70’s. At age 16 I was sucked up into this sort of technocratic hysteria, the belief that you could predict the future with psychohistory and then save mankind, sort of messianic and elitist. I was really interested in Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy. Maybe that’s something I needed to do, save the world, learn everything there was to know. Later on I became much more cynical, of course.

The Foundation Trilogy is actually related to The Story of Dora. Lots of physicists have entered Wall Street; they took their science and put it into predicting the market. If one scientist can own that, what does it mean for everyone else? Who would you want to give that power of prediction to, if it were possible? In the interview I read with one of the computer scientist’s working on the stock market black box, I sensed he knew it wasn’t morally right, but rationalized it, using Asimov’s “psychohistory”, which I found interesting and disturbing. It took me ten years to find my way into that story. Dora the cyborg is born of an interest in what is happening for physicists today, and my concern and interest is in how capitalist markets are run, and of course, the female orgasm. That dovetailed into teaching science fiction and slipstream.

On that note, how do you define “slipstream” fiction?

Well it’s not technically a sub-genre. Bruce Sterling coined the phrase to define what was happening in 1989 within the science fiction genre. Sci-fi is now moving into the mainstream, so in magazines there is still hard sci-fi, but the fantasy elements are taking center stage. I don’t know if that term will be very dated two years from now. People are trying to sell their anthologies and books, which I understand, it’s hard to sell books, but I think that students are interested in the tropes of the horror genre, fantasy.

I think everyone likes to write science fiction now. There is no such thing as sci-fi. We are no longer Future Shocked like in the ‘70’s when there was surprise over how quickly things were changing. Now people anticipate fast, technological change. If we start terraforming, then there will be nothing we haven’t done. Maybe we’ll get back to [Russell Hoban’s] Riddley Walker eventually, back to where it’s post-apocalyptic, to the Stone Age and nature and reinventing the wheel. I think sci-fi is an important vehicle for our study in history in America of genius inventors, rags-to-riches tales, part of the American fabric that will always be interesting to study. I think that we’ve moved out of seeing scientists in the same god-fearing way, and they are not the giants in charge of the culture’s focus or progress. It’s more diluted than that and I’m still trying to figure out why. Maybe technology has been more democratized.

Your novella Black Market Babies is a staggering piece of work. It tweaks the reader’s sense of reality in sly, artful ways, so that when one finishes the novella, she realizes she’s been on a tumultuous journey. Who is your ideal reader?

That book was written at a very different time for me and I no longer have the same goals as a writer. An improvisational work. I began as a poet. That is more a part of that work than what I write now. What I write now is more dialogue- and plot-driven. I would never put the reader through such hair-raising turns ever again. I don’t think I could do it, so, Black Market Babies would have a very different reader than I want, maybe. My ideal reader would be all readers. If it’s a good book, it has that potential to be read by everyone. Not my father, though [laughs].

Tell me more about your publisher for Black Market Babies, 11th Hour Press. Do they have a history of publishing works that dance around the science fiction genre?

They’re really a group of people who decided they would support me. Artist and illustrator Jonathon Rosen designed the book and did the cover illustration. I was living in the Bay Area at that time, which is a great area for small presses. Small Press Traffic helped. Ron Turner, who runs Last Gasp [Books], he discovered R. Crumb. Ron Turner publishes transgressive stuff, cartoons, low-brow art. I called him up and said, “I have this book and I really wanted to be included on the table at Virgin Books”. He said, why don’t you come with me to the Chicago Book Expo and I’ll give you a badge, so I went to the big book expo and we did business there. By the end of that weekend he bought 250 of my books off the bat, which was exciting, because most distributors don’t pay upfront. I got a lot of distributors and then it went from there. He was really instrumental.

Which literary journals, in your opinion, are most receptive to works of fantastical fiction?

I don’t write short fiction very much, and it’s all so experimental, so I don’t usually submit to these magazines. But I’d say Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, McSweeney’s, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

Do you like cats?

As much as Cordwainer Smith, maybe more.

Claire Phillips teaches writing and science fiction at the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc) and CalArts. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award. A podcast of her recent fiction can be found on the Writer’s Block at KQED.org.

by Courtney Johnson
a writer and an Associate Editor of Black Clock

photography by Monica Nouwens

Writing Consciousness in Contemporary Literature

Black Clock and, by extension, the MFA Writing Program that produces it, supports experimentation pointed at uncovering idiosyncratic, mysterious elements, the likes of which come together in every issue to make a unique and prominent literary journal. Issue number 11 invited readers to “be dazzled by the mysterious connections lighting the horizon…” and to experience, “secret stories told by characters who find themselves driven out of their own times by their own pursuits.” It seems fitting then, amidst the index of innovative contemporary writers featured in Black Clock today, to examine figures of contemporary literature whose work has also focused on mysterious connections, paving the way for the traditions of experimentation that have blossomed in the recent past, fostered by publications such as Black Clock and programs like CalArts’ Creative Writing.

In a series of posts centered around the writing of consciousness, memory and human experience, I intend to examine individual writers who experimented with writing consciousness and cognition in ways that subverted old norms of narrative as linear, “realist” and marked by set beginnings, middles and ends.

I’ll look first to the past and writers Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and Gertrude Stein–women represented individually by wide and diverse bodies of work as well as collectively, unified by a common gender and a shared historical standpoint. Such intersections of style, period and sex will behoove us to ask what about the twentieth century propelled writers away from the “realist” narrative forms elevated and celebrated by nineteenth century literature.

Likewise, and with a shift towards an examination of contemporary writers such as Carole Maso, Eva Figes and Jeanette Winterson, who, like their predecessors Woolf, Richardson and Stein, produce non-linear, experimental fiction and are themselves similarly associated with the female gender, this series will unpack in relation to experimental writing and the evocation of human consciousness, questions of gender, sexuality and the dubious existence of an “ecriture feminine.”

INTRODUCTION

We write now wholeheartedly into our own obsolescence, our own obscurity- a place at once tender and absurd and fierce. We chronicle figments, and it is as if we have already disappeared and our shadow words are trailing us, leaving their extraordinary, flickering residue.
______________________________________________________________ – Carole Maso

That a novel can be fractal, composed of splices, sound bites and memory scenes, is certainly not a new idea. After all, our pasts remain to us more as phrases of moments, flickers of sensory experience, than streamlined stories beginning with a problem and ending upon its resolution. Still, within a literary community historically committed to the “realist” novel as the ultimate form of storytelling, works of fiction structured to mirror human consciousness have oftentimes been categorized as too obscure to satisfy a perceived need for conflict, climax and culmination. Nevertheless, the twentieth century saw writers such as Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf experiment with writing consciousness and cognition in ways that subverted old norms of narrative as linear, “realist” and marked by set beginnings, middles and ends.

That each of these writers was female and each productive of work outside the linear lines drawn by the literary canon that preceded them certainly ushered in a myriad of theories concerned with connections between stream of consciousness prose and a feminine ecriture. Similarly, multiple connections between patriarchal constructs of traditional fiction and what subversion with non linear forms means to the establishment of a “feminine consciousness” have been made and surely bear consideration. For example, there is something to be made of Luce Irigary’s ideas of oceanic “feminine” experiences of pleasure, time and storytelling versus the climax and ultimate come down that characterizes the patriarchal, phallocentric structure of the modern Western world, narrative conventions included. Likewise, there are convincing connections to be made between postmodernism, the death of the subject, the infinitude of consciousness connected with it, and the centrality of narrative coherency given such changes.

And yet, in the face of such weighty concepts and questions, it seems to this reader that pivotal to the discussion of non linear narrative are not the theories of how culture creates form, or how social constructions influence our readings of said forms, but rather who creates them and how the work of independent writers simultaneously stands alone as examples of contemporary literature as well as components of an experimental tradition, connected by a shared interest in writing human consciousness.

EVOKING HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, A TRADITION RAISED BY A WOOLF

At the birth of this tradition we find Virginia Woolf and her Mrs. Dalloway, a piece detailing a single day spent inside the momentary thoughts of several characters, each of whom meander mentally through time, blurring tense and distinctions between indirect and direct narration.

Mrs. Dalloway is centered around the character of Clarissa Dalloway but segues fluidly from the interior of her mind to those of other characters and back again. The book, written in 1925, marks what many consider to be Woolf’s first successful work of fiction and certainly her most experimental up to that point. Where the majority of novels at the time designated sections and scenes via chapter breaks, Mrs. Dalloway is organized into parts, elements of the piece’s structure that serve to mirror the fluidity with which Woolf moves from the interior of one character’s mind to that of another. Certainly, at the core of Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s interest in individual consciousnesses and their intersections. Likewise, the novel marks Woolf’s attempt to explore the difference between individual consciousness and its insertion into group settings. Throughout the text we are privy to each character’s internal narrative while watching them interact with others and navigate social settings.

To be sure, the thoughts of characters connected to the novel’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, intertwine and intersect without their knowing. In rare, revelatory moments, however, Woolf’s characters experience the “moments of being” she writes of in her 1941 collection of essays as, “A philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mind that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected to this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”(Woolf, “Poetry, Fiction and the Future”) Said philosophy, described in Mrs. Dalloway as, “moments like…buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness,”(Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) is why the characters of Woolf’s novels cannot be disconnected from the network of thought, feeling and experience that binds them. The character of Clarissa Dalloway, for example, seemingly isolated and self contained, merges with the character of Septimus Warren Smith, via an unconscious association with his problems and perceptions.

Mrs. Dalloway, although certainly not Woolf’s most experimental work, is oftentimes credited with the advent of “stream of consciousness” prose and frequently compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which although similarly divided and structured, taking place over the course of one day, remains, in terms of perspective, seated in the interior mind of one principle character, Leopold Bloom. Mrs. Dalloway, widely considered to be Woolf’s response to Joyce’s novel, was criticized at the time for the perceived narrowness of its scope, given that it takes place within the sphere of the domestic, the everyday. That Woolf manages to address the interconnected pattern of human experience using the seemingly mundane, “feminine” experience of household and hosting duties is not only what sets her work apart from Joyce structurally, but is also what arguably makes it a more successful example of written evocation of human cognition, consciousness, and memory.

Indeed, Woolf actively refuted the “damned egotistical self,” she saw rendered by the work of Joyce as well as fellow female author Dorothy Richardson, concerning herself not with, “the single life, but with lives together.”(Woolf, Holograph Drafts) Such is certainly obvious in Mrs. Dalloway, a novel which, despite being focused on Clarrissa Dalloway as its primary character, drew connections between her interior mind and that of the myriad of characters whose thoughts Woolf also traced. Yet where Mrs. Dalloway focused on the intersections of distinct consciousnesses and was considered groundbreaking for doing so, Woolf’s later novel, The Waves, being more concerned with the collectivity and interconnectivity of time and thought, marked a development in her ideas of consciousness.

In 1926, two years after completing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf finished her To the Lighthouse , the writing of which, according to her journals, propelled her into a deep depression. This depression, which took her deep into the intricacies and darkness of her own mind, must have retrospectively operated as a gift to Woolf, who emerged intent upon writing those moments in which one glimpses their own consciousness. The nothingness Woolf experienced during her depression, and the mental space that supported it are part and parcel of what she is writing towards in The Waves. And such is why, as is true of many contemporary works pointed at evoking the nature of consciousness, The Waves is without a distinct climax, taking instead a shape that mirrors its title, swelling and backwashing, arising and subsiding.

Prior to beginning work on The Waves, Woolf addressed the difficulties facing writers aiming to address the nature of modern consciousness her essay “Poetry, Fiction and the Future,” writing that the new form will have to encompass, “something of the exaltation of poetry but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic and yet, not a play…it will stand further back from life. It will give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude.” (Woolf, “Poetry, Fiction and the Future”) Her novel is the subsequent realization of this new form. Framed as a series of episodic soliloquies, The Waves undulates across six individual voices and charts six distinct, but intertwining characters over the course of their lives. Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis begin the novel as children on holiday by the sea, moving then to their educational lives and ending with adulthood and a final section narrated by Bernard alone in which he directly addresses the reader, moving to “sum up…the meaning of my life.”(Woolf, The Waves) Where over the course of then novel each character emerges as unique and in possession of a distinct voice, Woolf’s intention was to write characters that mirrored the difficulty she experienced in, “collect[ing] oneself into one Virginia, even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings. I wanted to give the sense of continuity.”(Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf) Woolf’s intention to evoke this continuity results in a text marked by the intersections of consciousness and memory. This, “‘continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night &c, all flowing together; intersected by the arrival of the bright moths’…”(Woolf as quoted by Julia Briggs on page 242 of her, Virginia Woolf, An Inner Life) illustrates human consciousness by evoking memories and rendering them stylistically in the same way they occur in one’s mind; fragmented, but intersecting. Arising in a series of interconnected waves, one recollection flowing into the next.

Originally, Woolf wrote an initial chapter featuring, “many mothers, and before them many mothers, and again many mothers, groaning and giving birth, like one wave succeeding another…And all these waves have been the prostrate forms of mother, in their flowing nightgowns, with the tumbled sheets about them holding up, with a groan as they sink back into the sea, innumerable children.”(Briggs, p. 243) This early introduction marks not only, “a vision of maternal genesis challenging the patriarchal narrative of scripture,”(Briggs, p. 243) but also the collectivity of the consciousness Woolf was trying to evoke. Despite the eventual omission of this opening scene, the motif of universality remains, reflected in collectivity of The Waves’ characters and evoked by the use of repetition and symbolic motifs that Woolf linked to each.

Indeed, where Mrs. Dalloway was structured by the mundane, everyday experiences it took place inside, The Waves used other motifs to give form to an otherwise uncontained narrative. For example, and of particular pertinence to the idea of consciousness in The Waves, is the idea of absorption. Woolf frames the story with distinct moments of embodied presence, points in time such as childbirth, first kisses, and acts of creation where one is entirely engrossed in their experience and is therefore, purely conscious, fully embodied. (Briggs, p. 245) Such is evidenced by the entirety of the children’s experience in the first section, in which each character is alive inside the present moment, moving effortlessly from one sensory experience to the next. It is the intersection of the children’s bodies with each other, as well as with the natural world, that combines with the continuous and collective consciousness of their experience by the sea, composing Woolf’s idea of child’s time, unfettered by constraints and clock hands but moving, with the section’s progression, towards an awareness of their respective positions within space and time.

Mrs. Dalloway showed the cotton before pulling it away to reveal the inner lives that lie beneath. By contrast, The Waves goes right for the interior, bypassing the external shroud, the transience of which was exemplified by Mrs. Dalloway. In other words, where Mrs. Dalloway was pointed at showing the deep structure of the thoughts that underlie our everyday activities. The Waves does away with the denotative layer of the habitual, the mundane, and frames moments of being instead.

Works Cited
Briggs, Julia: Virginia Woolf, an Inner Life, Harvest Books; First Edition edition (November 6, 2006)
Woolf, Virginia: Selected Essays, Oxford University Press (January 2008)
Woolf, Virginia: The Waves, Cambridge University Press (October 31, 1986)
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, Harcourt (October 28, 2002)

by Allie Rowbottom
who received her BA in Creative Writing and Women’s Studies from New York University, is currently in CalArts’ MFA Writing Program, and in her free time enjoys yoga, horses and tea

HENRY MILLER (+ ANIMAL COLLECTIVE) WAS HERE

Sometimes, when I’m stuck in a writing rut, I find myself surfing the Internet, imagining what it would be like to be one of the literary greats. My searches have included the likes of Anton Chekov, Nikolai Gogol, Samuel Beckett, Shelley Jackson, and Kierkegaard, to name a few. But by far, the most Googled author in my search history is Henry Miller. Perhaps because I think, rather subjectively, that he may be one of the greatest authors of all time and also partly because I find the pictures of him and Anais Nin on a beach somewhere fantastic, the racy covers of his books, and the bizarre videos of his pornography-plastered bathroom utterly fascinating (a quick Google search should serve my point). Which brings me to one of my most exciting finds as a result of writing procrastination: The Henry Miller Memorial Library.

The Henry Miller Memorial Library is situated on Highway One (Pacific Coast Highway) in the picturesque Big Sur, California over-looking the Pacific Ocean. The library itself stands as a living homage to the late Henry Miller (and should you not know who Henry Miller is—I resist here admonishing you—he is the author of classics Tropic of Cancer and the Rosy Crucifixion among others.) This non-profit library teems with literary history and screams VISIT ME!

It’s said that when Henry Miller first visited Big Sur in 1944, upon arriving, he uttered, “Here I will find peace. Here I shall find strength to do the work I was meant to do.” He lived in Big Sur with his third wife and two children. Miller wrote; “Peace and solitude! I have had a taste of it, even here in America.”

Henry Miller was enormously influenced by the environment in Big Sur, California. Miller’s amorous fascination is best exemplified in his classic, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, within which he wrote, “This place can be a paradise. It is now, for those who live it. But then will be another paradise, one in which all share, all participate. The only paradise, after all.” (pp. 403-404).

A man named Emil White can be thanked for producing the Henry Miller Memorial Library. White had been one of Miller’s closest friends. So close that should you flip through the last few pages of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, you will find Miller’s dedicated inscription of the book which reads, “To Emil White of Anderson Creek one of the few friend who has never failed me …” (Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, 1957).

After having been deemed a revolutionary by the Hungarian Army and narrowly escaping death by firing squad, Emil White immigrated to the United States. White found a job at a bookstore and it is there that Henry Miller and Emil White met for the first time. White had been a huge fan of Miller’s, despite the fact that his work was relatively unknown in the United States at this time. Emil joined Miller in Big Sur after the author asked him to work as both his caretaker and personal secretary for five dollars a week.

Once settled in Big Sur, White took up painting and produced tour guide brochures for a living. It is said that the profit from these guides is what funded White’s founding of the library in 1987 after Henry Miller’s death. Emil White bought the property upon which the library now stands; an astonishing meadow gated with colossal redwoods. Upon Miller’s death, White decided to maintain the property to serve as a memorial to Henry Miller and as a haven for local artists to showcase their work. Emil stated in his will that his property would be an homage to the great author and to future scholarly research on Henry Miller.

Emil White’s wishes have been granted. Today, the library functions as so much more than a memorial. In 1997, it became accredited as an official 501(c)3 non-profit organization. It is a place of literature, music, culture and beauty. With an incredible outdoor performance stage, the library has been host to performances by Animal Collective, Neil Young, Patti Smith and Henry Rollins, to name a few. The library holds frequent workshops, readings, poetry slams, art exhibits, private events, and educational fairs.

In one of Emil White’s last interviews, he was asked if he had any regrets. He remarked, “I only wished I had moved to Big Sur sooner.” Three hours from San Francisco and six and a half from Los Angeles make this iconic library the perfect literary excursion. The library’s devotion to literature and to the work and life of great author Henry Miller solidifies it as an important literary place.

Surrounded by beauty and enveloped in a rich world of writers, poets, and artists, it may be the exact inspiration you need to finish that story and start your novel. Or maybe that’s the inspiration I need—nevertheless, I plan on making the scenic trip up there the first chance I get. And none of this could be possible without my daily dose of procrastination. Which is why I’ve included some links below; because discovery is important, no matter what you put off doing to get there. As Henry Miller once said, “Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.” Exactly.

For more info on the exciting things taking place at the Henry Miller Library and about founder Emil White and Henry Miller, check out their website. Also worth tuning into are NPR’s Bob Edwards interview Henry Miller Library Director Magnus Toren and this YouTube video which features the great Miller reminising about his favorite place.

by Katie Manderfield
an MFA candidate at CalArts, an editorial assistant for Black Clock, and is constructing an experimental literary journal for women; her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, 3:AM, and dogmatika

photography from The Henry Miller Memorial Library

Orpheus vs. Orpheus

THE HYMNS OF ORPHEUS     vs       THE ORPHIC HYMNS
by Orpheus                                                         by Orpheus
Translated by Thomas Taylor                       Translated by A. Athanassakis
306 pp. Philosophical Research Society      146 pp. Society of Biblical Literature

The beauty of the Orphic Hymns lies primarily in the mystery of their provenance. Legendary poet Orpheus, companion of Jason, descender into Hades, and father of ancient Greek theology, certainly had a busy and well-documented life of adventure. Due to the variety of legends and stories involving Orpheus, it is impossible to offer a sequentially arranged and definitive synopsis of his life. According to the different traditions, his father was either a quasi-legendary Thracian king named Oeagrus, or the god Apollo. Regardless, at some point in his early youth, Apollo became fond of him and gave him a golden lyre, which he taught him to play. Orpheus’ mother, who was either the Muse Calliope or a mortal woman descended from a Muse, instructed him on the writing of verse. The key aspect of the Orpheus myth resides there, in his felicity with song and poetry. According to Aeschylus, Orpheus’ talent was such that the very rocks and trees responded to his compositions. He was a member of Jason’s crew on the Argonaut, and saved his companions from the Sirens by outsinging those legendary temptresses. He later descended into Hades to reclaim his deceased wife, Eurydice, and his songs were such to move the pity of Death himself. Eurydice was granted life, on the condition that Orpheus could lead her out of the underworld without looking back. He failed, and she remained in the clutches of Hades. He was so distraught by this that he renounced the love of women, and is sometimes credited with the invention of Greek homosexuality. The most famous account of his death is at the hands of a group of enraged, female followers of Dionysus, who resented his love of male youths and his rejection of their god. The Dionysian priestesses ripped him to shreds in a drunken fury, but could not prevent his severed head from singing. His golden lyre was reclaimed by Apollo and installed in the heavens, where it can be viewed to this day as an arrangement of stars.

There is no definitive statement within any of the ancient sources of the Orpheus myth to explain when and for what reasons he sat down to compose his hymns, which are the only extant complete body of his writing. In addition to the hymns, there have come down to us a fragmented Theogony, known as the Rhapsodic Theogony, and pieces of an Argonautica told from Orpheus’ perspective, which are also attributed to Orpheus himself. The complete hymns were known and read at least as early as 500 CE, when they were mentioned in a Latin codex (Athanassakis xii). The current collection, on which our two English translations by Thomas Taylor and A.A. Athanassakis are based, appeared around the 12th century. Our translators offer widely differing scholarly ideas about the true history of the hymns, opinions which greatly influence the style and content of the respective translations. Even their answers to the key questions – Did Orpheus exist? and Did he write these hymns?–are widely divergent.

Thomas Taylor published the first English translation of the hymns in 1792. An avowed classicist and ‘liberal mind,’ Mr. Taylor prefaces the hymns with a lengthy dissertation on the life and theology of Orpheus. His purpose for embarking on the work is to reveal the heritage of Greek philosophy as beginning with Orpheus and continuing through Pythagoras and Plato, and to also showcase the striking similarities between the religious ideas of the ancient Greeks and modern Christian beliefs.

Ultimately, his prefatory dissertation is of more value than the translations themselves. Mr. Taylor, through close study of obscure ancient sources, many of them available to him only as crumbling medieval manuscripts, has provided us with a clear and sensible historical outline of the hymn’s genesis, and also a revelatory summation of the life of the author. Mr. Taylor accepts it as a matter of fact that Orpheus did in fact exist, that he (more or less) accomplished all the feats attributed to him, and that he composed his hymns as a repository for his spiritual and philosophical knowledge. The ingenuous solution to the obvious biographical paradoxes – i.e. how could one person die so many different ways – is that Orpheus is a reincarnate spirit, like the Buddha, and that there were actually four ancient Orpheuses, and five if you count the first Orpheus’ decision to reincarnate initially as a swan, so as not ‘to be born of woman.’ Each of these Orpheuses accomplished different things; for the sake of this review, we need only identify that it was the fourth Orpheus who composed the hymns, sometime between 800-600 BCE.

As for the Taylor translation itself; it is, in a word, terrible. Mr. Taylor himself seems to acknowledge this, and offers in his preface not only the timeless translator’s complaint of the ultimate impossibility of their enterprise, but also an explanation of the Hymn’s singular difficulty. Apparently their construction around conclusive epithets involves so many hermetic devices that it is impossible to communicate their meaning to the uninitiated. According to Mr. Taylor:

Most of the compound epithets of which the following Hymns chiefly consist, thought very beautiful in the Greek language; yet when literally translated into ours, lose all their propriety and force. In their native tongue, as in a prolific soil, they diffuse their sweets with full-blown elegance; but shrink like the sensitive plant at the touch of the verbal critic, or the close translator (ix).

None of this, however, explains Mr. Taylor’s most grievious injury to his source material: his decision to render the hymns in a contemporary idiom, wholly prosaic and entirely inappropriate, complete with an awkward a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. Yikes.

A. Athanassakis does a much better job with the actual translation, and in his preface offers a much more sober–some would say boring and unexciting–explanation of the hymn’s provenance. According to him, Orpheus existed in the same way Hercules did: as a mythical character that, over time, accumulated a symbolic/spiritual significance which attracted a band of worshippers. The Orphic hymns were thus composed around 400 CE by a nameless priest of the Orphic cult, for use in a ritual setting.

Mr. Athanassakis, who has taught in the Classics Department of UC Santa Barbara for nearly thirty years, composed his translation in the 1960s, on a commission from a group concerned with making available obscure ancient religious texts for scholarly study. It is intended as a corrective for the Taylor translation, which, according to Athanassakis, obscures the intermittent literary quality of the original. Mr. Athanassakis, a professional scholar of Greek and translator, has also done celebrated, academic translations of the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod’s Theogony; having no personal knowledge of Greek, I take this to signify a greater fidelity to the original than that offered by Mr. Taylor.

The Athanassakis translation is, as he states, straightforward and unadorned. There is no rhyme scheme, no attempt to resolve linguistic obscurities; the result is a batch of hymns that are intermittently dull, often interesting, and, on a couple of occasions, truly stunning. Take, for example, the two renderings of Hymn LXXX.

Taylor:

TO THE WEST WIND

Sea-born, aerial, blowing from the west,
Sweet gales, who give to weary’d labour rest:
Vernal and grassy, and of gentle sound,
To ships delightful, thro’ the sea profound;
For these, impell’d by you with gentle force,
Pursue with prosp’rous Fate their destin’d course.
With blameless gales regard my suppliant pray’r,
Zephyrs unseen, light-wind’d, and form’d from air.

Athanassakis:

TO ZEPHYROS

Western breezes, ethereal begetters of all,
as you blow gently your whisper brings deathlike rest.
Vernal and meadow-haunting, you are loved by havens
because to ships you bring . . . soft and light air.
Come in a spirit of kindness and blow perfectly,
O airy, invisible and light-winged ones.

Again, I have no personal knowledge of ancient Greek, but “vernal and grassy” can’t sound good in any language. It can be seen that in the Taylor translation we get a stilted example of English Romantic poetry, stamped upon an ancient Greek source; in the Athanassakis, a simple but moving poem of ethereal beauty. The value of the Taylor translation, as stated, resides in his explication of Orphic theology and adventurous interpretation of the hymn’s compositional history. As a purely literary document, however, the Athanassakis work stands on a higher level. It is impossible to determine the historical accuracy of the Orpheus myth. According to Orphic scholar M.L. West, who bases his determination on various ancient Greek sources, Orpheus would have predated Homer by several centuries, and even the ancient accounts that document that era are secondhand and steeped in allegory. Regardless, whether the hymns are the literal utterances of Apollo’s son, or the creation of “a religious association of people who called themselves mystic initiates” (Athanassakis 4), their literary quality is revealed in the more recent translation. It can be hoped that more scholarly attention may solve the riddle of their appearance, but until then, we must enjoy them for what they are: beautiful poems of indisputably spiritual significance.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Archive for 2010—

Being Born

mid)rib

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Books: The Coming Decade

BIRKENSNAKE: THE MUTANT LEFT-BEHIND COUSIN YOU ALWAYS WANTED

Twitterature: When Moby Dick Became The Fail Whale

Claire Phillips is a Cyborg (Maybe)

Writing Consciousness in Contemporary Literature

HENRY MILLER (+ ANIMAL COLLECTIVE) WAS HERE

Orpheus vs. Orpheus

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